Bittele strategy climbs turnkey PCB assembly ladder

Counting clients such as Bosch, Samsung, ST, Honeywell, Philips, Stanford University and the University of Toronto, Bittele Electronics Inc. has been providing turnkey PCB assembly services since 2003.

“Our focus is on prototypes and low-volume production,” said Bittele general manager Ben Yang. The Toronto-based company can also provide high-volume services with partners in China, Yang noted.

In serving the Canadian market, the company has a number of local partners to serve customers. It recently signed on Xptronics Inc., of Markham, ON in order to add a quick turnaround PCB assembly operation (www.xptronicsinc.com).

“We are different from other assembly services,” explained Yang, “by offering unique manufacturing technologies.” Part of Bittele’s service is providing a DFM check (design for manufacture) before moving a project to production.

“We carefully review all design files – and fix them if necessary. This way, the customer has no surprises or mistakes in the final product.”

{nomultithumb}Bittele has a team that checks for design files and revisions on a daily basis so that projects stay up to date and on track for production or prototyping. On top of that, Bittele also maintains its own libraries of part packages, reference files that are invaluable at the layout stage.

“We can search for part design files in our own database – most packages are in there – saving project time for the customer.” Having the correct Gerber file matches for chip packages means Bittele can “avoid workarounds” in the PCB designs, said Yang.

The company’s in-house design expertise provides assistance to circuit designers, “extra things of value other than just PCB fabrication and assembly.”

Removing the headache of sourcing components is also very useful to Bittele customers, according to Yang. “This helps the designers to concentrate on the PCB design and have to take more time making calls and emailing vendors for parts.

“Obsolete components can be sourced through our global team, too,” said Yang. He added that prototypes requiring only 3 or 4 parts often prove difficult to source when many suppliers aren’t interested in such a low volume order.

When it comes to student projects, Bittele is there to offer assistance at cost or free, noted Yang. Its sponsorship program helped the Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team by supplying custom PCBs for a project this summer.

Ege Borluoglu, marketing coordinator of Bittele Electronics, noted on its website: “We aim to help future engineers achieve their goals and look forward to sponsoring further PCB services for students, teams and organizations. If you have an exciting student project, contact us at support@7pcb.com and we’ll see if we can help.”